Museum Wish List Of Broadcast Relics

January 7, 1986|By Charles Champlin

The Museum of Broadcasting in New York, opened in 1976 to locate and preserve television and radio's past (and present), has taken to compiling wish lists -- lists of television shows it dearly wishes it had but can't find.

The museum's first list included the original production of Gian-Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors'' from Christmas 1951, and luckily a copy of it turned up.

But still missing is, for example, the premiere broadcast of The Tonight Show (Sept. 27, 1954), with Steve Allen hosting. Most of the Tonight shows from the '50s and '60s have been lost or destroyed, says museum representatives, including Jack Paar's historic walk-off and Johnny Carson's no less historic debut (Groucho Marx introduced him).

Super Bowl I (Jan. 15, 1967) was videotaped by not one but two networks -- and erased. The first televised NFL championship game is missing (Los Angeles Rams vs. Cleveland Browns, Dec. 23, 1951).

The first televised presidential election coverage (Harry Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey) in November 1948, can't be found. Neither can the first televised presidential address from the White House (Truman on Sept. 30, 1947).

Ernie Kovacs, the first comedian to make full use of the trickeries of the medium, did his first series, Three to Get Ready, from a Philadelphia station, WPTZ, in 1950 and 1951. The museum would dearly love to get hold of any portion of it.

The televised version of The Petrified Forest (Sept. 20, 1955), with Humphrey Bogart reprising his film role, is missing, and the museum has only half the original Studio One version of Twelve Angry Men.

Robert Batscha, president of the museum, said a telecast of the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 20, 1939 (with Gen. David Sarnoff and President Franklin D. Roosevelt on hand), is regarded as the start of commercial TV broadcasting. The event is presumably lost to history, except in stills.

Unavailable as well is a telecast from Oct. 17, 1941, which originated in New York and was carried in Philadelphia, thus becoming the first network show.

The museum has just totted up a supplemental list of missing pleasures. It includes The Jonathan Winters Show (Oct. 23, 1956), an early use of videotape. The Damon Runyon Memorial Fund (April 9, 1949) has its own distinction -- it was the first telethon, hosted by Milton Berle.

The Storm (1950-53) was an early series by Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame. It was produced in Cincinnati. The museum has only one episode of Nightbeat from 1955, the famous open-pore interview series conducted by Mike Wallace.

There were several pilot episodes of All in the Family, done between 1968 and 1971, that the museum would like to get its hands on. And for a program of lasting reverberations, there is the May 4, 1957, Rock 'n' Roll Show, with Alan Freed hosting for ABC what is thought to be the first network exposure of the music.

Old films keep turning up in private collections and in foreign countries, with title cards in Hungarian or Croatian. It may be there are others that have been retrieved from trash bins by loving hands unwilling to see good work lost. You have to hope so. It's our history, not just the medium's.